We dove into LA.
From Highway 5, you slip and shudder over stabilized landslides, always downhill, until you reach an area where things continue their march to the sea in a slightly less obvious way – LA. At one point, all the trucks get off the freeway and circle underneath you to the left, until, for no apparent reason other than the whims of a god of traffic, they whip underneath you – shooting through a tunnel like frogger game until they rejoin you in forty-lane junction of a metal dance movement. All this in less than 5 miles.
Following signs to the Hollywood freeway we slowly creep along until we get to the Sunset exit – then we go left.
First thing seen -- the giant big blue city block that is the Scientology complex – some parts half built. Not an evil blue color, more a non-faded beach blue. Protestors surround the sidewalks, all protesting the lack of union participation in the construction. You would think the Scientologists would be more sensitive – the bastards are already illegal in Europe for god’s sake and they steal tons of money everyday – how hard would it be to go union? The place did not stink as much as I expected – but there was a definite smell to it.After shooting a picture to see if they would harass us, we entered the Armenian section of town – lots of Cyrillic looking Aramaic writing on 7-Eleven’s and carpet stores, all with the word Armenian in front of them. I was reminded of a Turkish girl I dated who always went on and on about the thieving Armenians from her homeland. “They are like ragged diseased gypsy’s, or werewolves,” she said.
She also said there were Armenians everywhere she looked these days, “It was less a genocide we did to them,” she said, “It was more like a culling.”
We got to the Ramada and checked in. It was four stories and each room opened to a patio facing a central courtyard. Older, it looked like something Trotsky would have stayed in while vacationing from Mexico in between his permanent revolutions. Kind of cool, in it’s own way – the most affordable 3-star available from Hotwire in Hollywood, though the stars may have actually been asterisks – I booked it with a pre-Intel Mac and the font may have been too small.
We cleaned up and had a couple of hours before my daughter got off work, so we went to see the rich people’s houses in Beverly Hills.
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